write a note on masculinity and femininity of indian society?
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Notions of Gender and Feminism
It is now accepted practice to make a distinction between sex and gender.
The first is a biological category, the second a social construct. This means, in effect, that a biologically male person can be feminine and a biologically female person can be masculine.
Masculinity and femininity then, can be described in terms of the qualities ascribed to them. Femininity is usually equated with passive qualities—something you can check for yourself by compiling a list of binary qualities and analysing the traditional associations with gender.
We go back here to what we read about binaries in the module on the nation. You will remember that binaries are hierarchical and function on an unequal plane, so that one is considered ‘better’ than the other. Feminist critics have pointed out that ‘feminine’ qualities are always the weaker half of the binary.
Masculinity and femininity make up one binary—which one is considered stronger? Keep in mind that the relations of power between the genders are fundamentally unequal—this is what is meant by patriarchy.
Feminism believes it is of vital importance to make a distinction between sex and gender, because when these two categories are blurred into each other the qualities of femininity are naturalized. This means that it becomes possible to say women are meek, timid, gentle and submissive with the same authority that one can say women have ovaries.
In fact, it becomes possible almost to say that women have these qualities because they have ovaries or just like they have ovaries—to ascribe these qualities to biology and make them seem natural and inherent rather than constructed. If women’s ‘weakness’ or ‘inferiority’ is a biological fact, it can no longer be questioned and the status quo can be maintained. This notion of the construction of gender in unequal ways is at the heart of feminism.
Feminism is too large a term to cover here, because there are very many feminisms. Indeed, it is inaccurate to think of feminism as one unified entity—the reality is that there are different kinds of feminism and not all of them agree on everything.
All feminisms however, are political discourses that are concerned with gender inequalities and their consequences to women in different spheres. Feminists over the years have analysed different issues and brought to light the workings of patriarchy in different areas. These analyses have included critiques of language, where they have shown how language is inherently biased in favour of the masculine, and the feminine is made invisible or inconsequential—think of the implications of words like mankind and history and their usage, and the even more damaging use of the generic pronoun ‘he’ to refer to any neutral human activity. Other areas of critique range from literature to politics to health